


Flame

by bonebo



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 11:14:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1031044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonebo/pseuds/bonebo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“What’s it like, this…thing, you say you feel?” he asks, everything in him nothing but curiosity and openness, a window flung wide on a breezy summer’s day, and Michael is helpless but to open the barred trap of his mouth and part picketrows of teeth and he can feel his heart rising into his throat as he manages to choke out a reply that sounds hollow, too bared too raw, even to his own ears.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>“It’s like drowning, and watching everyone else around you breathe.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Flame

He’s not right.

It’s the first thought in his head when he wakes up in the morning, his first conclusion on a rainy August day because his eyesight’s too blurry for him to make out anything other than his deformity, these messed up eyes in his messed up head on top of his messed up body. He rolls out of bed and staggers to the shower—legs stiff from being curled up all night long, body tense and taut even in rest, protecting against every monster that leaps out of the games he plays and takes root in his own mind—prods the deepening furrow between his brows, pulls at the shadowed bags under his eyes, debates another Red Bull and wonders how long it’ll be before he can sleep a night without waking up feeling exhausted. Clothes shed, he hides himself from the mirror as he starts the water, grateful for the poor vision so his reflection is nothing but a blur—a simple smudge across a perfect clear plane, unnoticed, unimportant.

Michael Jones.

Sixty-eight minutes and four caffeine pills—a double dose, because two just won’t hold back the murky sludge that threatens to flood his brain and body anymore—later, Michael pulls his jacket around himself a little tighter and walks into the RT office. The pills have done their work by now, forcing his body to burn energy that isn’t really there, and his mood lifts like two sandbags under three thousand balloons. He gives a grin and a wave to Geoff and Jack and settles in at his desk, leaning back and opening the videos that he (shouldn’t have) left undone the night before (with his mind screaming for the repose of home, fingers tripping over worn keys, unable to bear the intensity and the closeness any longer).

He’s almost finished with the first video when the door opens, and like an idiot he has to look over—

(Who else could it be, showing up this late to work, jacket wrinkled and hair a perfect wreck?)

—and his breath catches in his throat once again and he fumbles over his keyboard and accidentally deletes all the work he’d been doing since he got there.

A curse and a click later and the file is restored, but that doesn’t matter—what matters is that the sun has crash-landed in the seat beside Michael, and it’s blinding and dazzling, perfect and so so damaging, everything that anything needs to flourish and yet taunting, scalding, burning so bright that every single fleeting touch burns.

Gavin Free is the sun, a light shining.

And like a dark moth drawn to flickering flame, Michael Jones cannot bring himself to look away.


End file.
